Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Shopping for human rights

"That, given Canada and Israel share a long history of friendship as well as economic and diplomatic relations, the House reject the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which promotes the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel, and call upon the government to condemn any and all attempts by Canadian organizations, groups or individuals to promote the BDS movement, both here at home and abroad."

Liberals and Conservatives - Yes - 229 votes

NDP and Bloc - No - 51 votesYou can see how each MP voted at the link at top or watch them vote here : "Opposition Motion : Israel"

137 Liberals out of 184 voted in favour, 44 Liberals skipped the vote, and only 3 voted against it : Larry Bagnell, Nick Whalen, and Rene Arsenault.

92 Cons voted in favour while 7 skipped the vote.

Elizabeth May last week : "I will not be supporting it, but I want to make it very clear that the Green Party and I personally do not support the BDS movement." She also skipped the vote.

What's this crap about "demonization and delegitimization of Israel"?

Does everyone get that BDS is basically about shopping?

We're talking about making shopping choices to apply pressure to support Palestinian human rights here.

And now we're being condemned by our government for what we think about making those choices? Unbelievable.

8 comments:

In the world of fractured values we live in, Alison, it would seem that the greatest act of betrayal is to choose not to shop. It is anathema to the corporate values held so close to the hearts of our major political parties.

The photograph you posted represents the Israeli government's tactic of "Dahiyeh." This is the calculated choice to target civilians. It's named after a neighbourhood in Beirut where Israeli generals first perfected the tactic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine

This is a war crime as monstrous as it is obvious. It has since been inflicted on the Palestinians three times. The Israelis call that giving Gaza a "hair cut" or "mowing the lawn."

Israel's last Gaza slaughter began in the predictable way for Dahiyeh. For two days Israeli jets attacked Gaza's electrical, water and sewage utilities. Those are also prohibited targets under the laws of war. From there the bombing campaign moved on to hospitals, schools and residential neighbourhoods like the one in the photo.

The Harper government, of course, claimed this was self-defence. Ignatieff went further, pre-absolving Israel of blame for its excesses. The NDP were hardly better.

This BDS resolution is an act of complicity. The Liberals don't have enough weasel words to plaster this over.

How would liberals react, I wondered, to this latest betrayal of a cause they'd long espoused? Would they call it "smart politics" like when Trudeau voted for C-51 or would they say "his hands are tied" as in the Saudi arms deal? Turns out after a momentary pause, they just went back to trashing the Cons. Bah.

BDS is about the purest form of democracy we have. The fact that parliament decided to condemn a movement that aims to the de-commercialize the occupation from its use of Caterpillar to bulldoze home to the ability of occupying settlers to use Air BnB to further entrench themselves by creating a system that rewards their occupation.